From Capitol Kinks to Curaçao Bliss: Debra Samuels

This feature unfolds from a shared urge toward the fugitive possibilities of queer existence, especially when lived loud, kinky, and gloriously radical. Debra Samuels, domme, grandmother, foot-fetish archivist, and late-life migrant, reminds us that liberation doesn’t necessarily need a flag or a parade. Sometimes it is just a moment of lucidity and a willingness to scream “I’m free” in the street. Her story is not offered as spectacle, but as a reference point in the archive of survival, fuelled by power and pleasure.

Some lives do not ask to be seen. They demand new approaches and lenses. Debra Samuels moves in that space, not waiting for representation but queering the script of visibility. A woman of heels, hunger, and hard-earned joy, she is not chasing legibility. She is building a visuality of her own, one that slips past control, refuses the spectacle, and insists on something freer, messier, more alive.

Leaving the United States was not a dramatic escape. No revolution. No grand exit. Just a haircut, a warm wind, and a Black woman striding through the streets of Willemstad, in Curaçao–a city once mapped by Dutch generals, now remapped by a sovereign femme in heels reclaiming her time and her joy. For Debra Samuels, it was the sound of finally arriving in her body and in her life.

After decades in Washington, D.C., raising kids, dominating clients, and dodging the chokehold of respectability, she landed in Curaçao by chance and stayed by choice. What was supposed to be four weeks became three years–and counting! In that time, she has built a chosen family of fellow queers and footboys, and refused every attempt to pin her down within a single discursive frame: “Stop calling me a lesbian,” she says. “I’m not gay. I’m not straight. I’m queer, bitch. I’m Debra.”

Migration was never the escape but the return. The original plan was Panama. Debra wanted the senior discounts, the tropical infrastructure, the proximity–in theory, at least–to the U.S. But after ten days in Panama City, she had had enough. “Panama looked at me like paperwork,” she says. “Curaçao looked at me like colour.” Her cousin, already living on the island, texted her: come breathe, Auntie. So she did.

By the fourth week, she was looking for her own apartment. “I had never felt at home in the United States. Ever.” When she recalls that moment, she laughs. “I had just gotten a fresh cut, walked out of the salon, and right there in the street, I turned around and screamed, I’m free.”

Before Curaçao, there was D.C. And an attic. “That was my dungeon,” she says, grinning. “Eyebolts in the ceiling, velvet ropes, red lightbulbs. Quite a few politicians came through the backdoor and paid to kiss my feet.” As Xena, Mistress of the Capitol, Debra ran a tight business in foot worship, domination, and corporal discipline. No nudity. No sex. Just consent and control. “Some paid two hundred dollars just to smell my shoes. One Greek client paid me five hundred for what we called nuggets. I shat on a plate and served it in a dog bowl. I did not even smell it. I just got paid.”

Her late wife Patricia knew about it all and laid down just one rule. No women clients. “She was my ride or die. Eight years gone now. And since then, I have not really looked for anyone else.”

In the U.S., queerness felt like a constant act of negotiation. In Curaçao, it is community. Imperfect but tender. “In D.C., you are surrounded but alone. Here, we collide,” Debra says. “We cry in the club together, we hike, we eat, we talk real.”

She remembers her first birthday on the island. Alone at a restaurant, wearing her American football team shirt. A stranger noticed and asked, what you know about that jersey? By the end of lunch, they were singing happy birthday to her. That same day, she met the couple who own the island’s only gay bar. “They just pulled me in. Within weeks I was shaking my rainbow flag in the streets.”

When asked if she feels safe as a Black queer woman, she doesn’t flinch. “They say it’s not safe here. But I’ve had people in D.C. tell me I need dick just for holding a woman’s hand. Here, I walk around with rainbows painted on my face, and no one’s tried me.”

Retired isn’t the word. She may have changed the rhythm, but Debra is still very much in business. She now takes sessions through online groups, where footboys from the Netherlands and beyond wire her cash for permission to serve. “They fly here just to kiss my boots. And they’re grateful for it.”

But access has its terms. Her private life isn’t up for negotiation. “First meetings are in public. Hotels only. My home is sacred. You don’t get that key without years of proof.” Debra isn’t hiding. She’s protecting the world she’s built. This isn’t about secrecy: it’s about sovereignty. Access isn’t given, it’s earned. Always.

Now, nearly seven decades in, she says she’s never felt more magnetic. “Some of these boys have in their bio: ‘Looking to be owned by a 60+ mistress.’ I’m like – yes, motherfucker, come on.”

Debra’s story doesn’t need linear wrap-ups. It doesn’t resolve into activism or assimilation or happy-ever-after. It is about possibility. What happens when a Black queer woman refuses every shrinking narrative of respectability, category, or pain. Her life is messy, glittery, powerful. It is both testimony and manual. In a Caribbean context too often dismissed as conservative, she is making space. She is thriving with stilettos on, dungeon kit packed, and a dancefloor still calling.

She calls it freedom. Not because life is perfect, but because she can say yes or no without flinching. Because she can flirt, roam, kiss who she wants, and still be held by her people.

She’s not done. “I told my great-grandson I’m coming to his grandkids’ school,” she says. “I want to live to 108 or more. And with my heels on.” Her joy isn’t performative. It’s hard-earned. And it spills into everything she touches: every conversation, every stomp of her boot, every sigh after a good laugh.

If the queer archive is alive, Debra is one of its most radiant pages. Her presence refuses the racialised visual logics that have long positioned Black women into only roles of utility rather than agency. As feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, visibility is not just about being seen. It’s about how we are seen, who gets to look, and who gets to tell the story. Debra does not simply ask for representation. She bends the frame. She becomes the frame. And in doing so, she creates a world not built on granted access, but on radical possibilities.